“I just don’t understand,” said Harry, “Four weeks ago, we introduced an incentive program for efficiency on the shop floor, and so far, I haven’t seen any improvement at all. What are we doing wrong?”

“In the past four weeks, since you introduced this incentive program, how many meetings have you held to talk about efficiency?” I asked.

“Meetings? That is why we started the incentive program, so we wouldn’t have to have meetings, so we wouldn’t have to spend time talking about it. With the money we put out there, they should be able to figure some things out, shouldn’t they?”

“Just because you have put up some money to achieve a specific result, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to talk about it. Some behaviors will help efficiency, some behaviors may not, some behaviors may even work against efficiencies. You have an incentive program, but you still have to have the conversation.

“I want you to think about this. Even if you did not have an incentive program, wouldn’t the conversation still be critical? Wouldn’t it be valuable to talk about positive behaviors that work for us and other behaviors that work against us?” -TF